My battery drained overnight

[pbrennan42]

I woke up this morning to find my battery totally flat. I mean as dead as a dodo. Now it is on charge and is charging up ok.

What I need to do now is discover what on earth drained my battery within 6 hours and do something or other to prevent it happening again.

So you guys who know a lot about these things, please chip in with your knowledge of what drains batteries the worst and how to get the best life with it.

Thanks,

Phil.

 

[Zorro1]

Did ya even search, Phil? There are two threads going right now on this. I've discovered that if you've gone to Airplane mode so that everything is shut off, the last thing that is the big sucker is the email service. Go to your settings controls and look for where the running stuff is, hit email, turn it off. Now, it will still work! But it won't turn on until you fire up service again. I've gone from having to charge every 20 hours to now over three days with light use.

 

[pbrennan42]

Well, this is unusual coz my battery has never drained from 80% to 15% in six hours, so it is not your usual turn email off (Although I have just done that) kind of situation.

It's more like WTF has just caused my battery to drain so fast?

Phil.

 

[Zorro1]

That is fast. Mine's not yet two weeks old, but I noticed right away that it was dropping from 70 to 20% overnight, in Airplane mode! When I shut off that email, suddenly, either no drop, or 10%. Something got left on...wifi? BT?

 

[pbrennan42]

I have no idea. So while it is charging I am going through it with a fine tooth comb and using your advice on how to minimise unnecessary battery usage while I work out what on earth drained me so fast.

Phil.

 

[Cory Streater]

In the case where it drains extremely fast, even though it's in airplane mode or having low usage, maybe there's an app pegging the CPU really hard and sucking a lot of power. We need a way to analyze CPU and memory utilization like we can on a PC or Mac.

 

[Zorro1]

Process of elimination will do it tho', eventually. The setting I found was called Settings Running or something like that, built in, not an app or anything...It shows them all. And if something didn't quit, like I had one early on that didn't, I can quit it there. Oh, I also had three different weather apps at one time until I could figure out how to uninstall two of them. So now, only my keyboard, weathereye, and a couple minor ones run usually.

 

[Cory Streater]

Yeah you can see that in Settings > Applications > Running Services, but it doesn't show you what percentage of the CPU each app is currently utilizing. Have you ever been on a PC or a Mac, and found an app is pegging your CPU at 99% because it's screwed up? It would be nice to be able to see that kind of detail on the Droid too. It might not be 99%, but maybe it's 50-60, which would also be a good indication that it's sucking a lot of battery.

One nice thing that I did find on the Droid, is if you go to Settings > About Phone > Battery Use, you can see a a list of items that have been consuming battery and by which % they are using them.

For example, mine says:

Display 50%
Voice Calls 23%
Browser 13%
Android System 6%
Cell Standby 4%
Phone Idle 3%
Android OS 2%

You can click each of these items for more information.

 

[Jerry Hildenbrand]

The app Spare Parts in the market is the same code as 8notime is describing but built for cupcake if your Pulse is stock/1.5 based

 

[pbrennan42]

Ooo the spare parts application is going to come in well handy...

Thanks for that heads up bghil.

Phil.